Korea picks Samsung-led team for $1.8b AI center

South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT said on May 11 it signed agreements with a consortium led by Samsung SDS, Samsung Group’s IT services unit, to build a 2.5 trillion won (US$1.7 billion) national AI computing center.

The deal finalizes the consortium as the sole bidder for South Korea’s flagship AI infrastructure project.

The group includes Naver Cloud, Samsung C&T, Kakao, Samsung Electronics, Clush, KT, South Jeolla Province, and Seonamhaean Geumjeok Dosib.

It plans to set up a special purpose company in the second quarter with 400 billion won (US$272 million) in initial funding.

The amount includes 116 billion won (US$78.9 million) from the public sector and 284 billion won (US$193 million) from private investors.

Construction is due to start in the third quarter, with more funding to follow through the SPC.

The center is planned to house 15,000 advanced AI chips by 2028 while offering discounts and vouchers to SMEs, startups, universities, and research institutes.

🔗 Source: Chosun Daily

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Samsung’s project is part of a wider AI infrastructure build

The national center is one of three large AI data centers Samsung SDS plans to build in South Korea. The company is seeking more than 140 megawatts of AI capacity as it moves deeper into cloud services 1.
The effort fits South Korea’s sovereign AI strategy. Sovereign AI means AI infrastructure and services stay under domestic control, so data plus computing capacity remain under national oversight. NVIDIA is working with South Korea to expand AI capacity with more than 250,000 NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs). GPUs are chips widely used for AI training or inference across sovereign clouds plus AI factories 2.
Speed matters. South Korea had around 2,000 NVIDIA H100 chips, a high-end AI processor, at the end of 2023. Meta plus Microsoft each had about 150,000 units 3.

Korea’s tech groups are building a national AI platform

The wider aim is to help South Korea produce and export “intelligence as a new export” that can drive global transformation 2.
The Samsung SDS-led consortium plans more than data center leasing. It also wants to build AI cloud servers, create software for customer-specific GPU management, and handle data from GPU operations 4.
Samsung SDS holds 30% of the venture. Samsung Group holds 37% in total, while Naver Cloud, the cloud computing arm of South Korean internet company Naver, holds 26% 4.
The partnership aims to give businesses, universities, research institutes, startups, plus AI companies in South Korea access to sovereign AI infrastructure for building AI models and applications 2.